What exactly is IMDb?

The IMDb or the Internet Movie Database is a popular online database. This database gives information concerning television programs, films, and video games. The information includes everything from the production crew, cast, fictional characters, plot summaries, biographies of celebrities, to trivia and reviews. Through this platform actors can post their own résumé and put up photos of themselves.For this they have to pay a yearly fee. Users in the U.S.A can view over 6,000 television shows and movies from sources like Sony, CBS, along with various independent film makers.

IMDb was launched in the year 1990 by Col Needham, a professional computer programmer. In 1996, the company was included as Internet Movie Database Ltd in the UK through the revenue generated from licensing, advertising, and partnerships. It then became a subsidiary of Amazon in 1998.This enabled them to use IMDb as a source for advertising to sell videotapes and DVDs.

The site has much to offer to the registered users. Firstly, it lets registered users submit new content along with requesting edits to existing ones. Through the site users are invited to rate films on a scale of 1 to 10. Then the totals are converted into a weighted mean-rating which is displayed against the title. The authenticated users take advantage of the message boards feature, which encourages regular debates.

The IMDb has become the world’s most authoritative source for movies, TV and celebrity related content. In fact, today IMDb is the only consumer movie website in the world that has a combined mobile and web audience of 250 million and more ‘Unique Monthly Visitors’. This is because IMDb gives a database that searches more than 185 million data items. This data includes 3 million and up movies, entertainment programs, and TV. It also has information on 6 million and more crew and cast members. This site has become a reliable rely source of information for consumers. The reason for this that IMDb also includes ticketing, trailers, user reviews, critic, photo galleries, personalized recommendations, editorial feature sections, trivia, entertainment news, box-office data, quotes, local movie show times, and most importantly a universal Watchlist, that creates a list of things a users wants to watch. IMDb has also become popular with apps and smartphones. Their portfolio of entertainment apps includes, ‘Movies & TV’ app which is for iPad, iPhone, Kindle Fire, Android tablets, and Android phones which are‘Mobile-optimized Website’. Till date worldwide, 115 million and more downloads of IMDb’s apps has been seen. The IMDb’s feature of X-Ray for Movies & TV Shows revolutionized the viewing experience. Bringing the IMDb directly to Fire TV Stick, Kindle Fire HD, and Fire TV changed things big time.

IMDb came up with IMDbPro, a subscription version designed solely for professionals working in the entertainment industry. IMDbPro provides contact information, casting service, television projects, in production listings for film, an optimized website for mobile and exclusive STARmeter rankings, which are determined by user on IMDb. Also, IMDb’s What to Watch, their original web series, helps fans discover movies and TV shows they will enjoy. Plus, IMDb operates and owns Withoutabox which is the chief submission service for filmmakers and film festivals. They also own Box Office Mojo which is the leading box-office reporting service on online.IMDb had around 3.4 million titles and more than 6.6 million personalities in their database, along with 60 million and more registered users and listed in Alexa Top 50 site in the year 2015.